vacationing while being a caregiver.

How I Will Attempt to Enjoy Myself While My Mother Knits Her Flag of Doom*

Credit: Sjo

As I write this, I am sitting at my desk in Connecticut and eating a medium-sized bowl of Ben and Jerry Cherry Garcia Ice Cream. I don’t even like ice cream.

Also, I’ve lost a much-needed seventeen pounds over the last year and I have no intention of putting them back on. But: extreme stress. Never mind the news, which is utterly cataclysmic. Susan and I are getting ready to spend three weeks in England and Scotland, at long last. (I say at long last because 1- we haven’t been back since 2014, during Susan’s last sabbatical; 2- we have great, old friends there who we rarely get to see, and they won’t be crossing the Atlantic in my direction anytime soon; 3- we love and miss the UK, where we have learned in the last few months that Susan has very deep roots.) We have been planning this trip for a long time and while it has required the organizational skills of General Patton, we can’t wait to be there. Normally, I would be very excited given our itinerary, which involves seeing our friends, meals at St. John, Rochelle Canteen, Quo Vadis, and possibly Dishoom, long-awaited visits to Sissinghurst and Great Dixter, Chelsea Physic Garden, Whitstable, Bristol, Edinburgh, a quiet farm stay/cottage near Perth, and a few days in Cambridge. However, I have become snappish and cranky and even a little weepy lately: there are practical travel concerns that I’m not even going to mention here, and the sense that there are a million things to do before we leave (in two days).

I’ll be in the UK while I hear her in the background asking the male EMT if he wants to listen to her CD because she is a very important singer and she’s on The Spotify and The Tic Tac

There is also this: the eldercare drama that absolutely always happens when we travel, this time being no different. My mother, at 89 and wildly (clinically) borderline, intensely charming but also violently crafty and duplicitous — let’s just say she plans far ahead — has somehow decided that we are selling our house in New England and moving to Old England because why would we just go to visit? Who does that? It sounds very fishy to me, she said the other morning, and when I asked In what way? she said I don’t know, but I just know the way mothers know.

Oh, sure, I thought. Your non-existent maternal instinct has suddenly revealed itself at the age of 89.

But I didn’t say that. Instead, I approached it with logic:

When you and Buddy [my stepfather] traveled, did you sell your apartment?

No, she said. But I did when your father and I traveled.

No you didn’t, I said.

Yes I did, she said.

You didn’t even own your apartment, I said. We were renters the entire time you were married to my father.

She got very quiet. Then she pivoted and began to bad-mouth her aide in the worst (worst, worst) possible manner. I cut her off, and then I calmly and quietly gave her my list of wants:

I want no craftiness. No self-harm. No planning-for-illness. No refusal to let the aide in. No firing of the aide. No feigned falls. No fighting with the neighbor. No fighting with the doctor. No fighting with the superintendent. No eating saltwater taffy designed to pull out your bridge. No loss of your wallet. No accidentally giving away your social security number to a nice man on the phone who asked for it. No locking yourself in, in the way you did that time when I was in Maine and you “slid to the ground” and the fire department had to break down the apartment door because no one had your keys and you wanted me to drive home ten hours in an ice storm to let them in.

A heavy silence followed.

But we leave on Thursday, so she still has a little less than a week to invent a problem. And with my mother, that means planning — literally planning — the way I used to plan four strokes ahead when I played squash, which is like chess only with racquets and a ball. What this means for her is she’ll begin at the desired result — getting me to come home — and work her way backward: if she eats X, to which she has a known allergy, she may become dehydrated and then she may faint, and if she faints in the right part of the house, she won’t be near a phone, and because she refuses to wear her personal emergency alert button, no one will be able to reach her (and vice versa), and I will call and the phone will ring and ring, and I’ll text the neighbor who will bang on the door and hear nothing, and they will call the EMT who will have to enter the apartment against her will, and she will neglect to tell them that I am overseas, they will call my cell phone (which will work in England) and tell me to meet them at the hospital and I will say I’m in the UK while I hear her in the background asking the male EMT if he wants to listen to her CD because she is a very important singer and she’s on The Spotify and The Tic Tac and if her daughter gave a shit about her she would have stayed the hell home.

I probably sound very brusque, but this is all very real, and highly probable, and every adult child of an elderly person goes through it to one extreme or another. We’ve been living with it, or a version of it, for a long time. In 2014, Susan and I spent the week after Christmas in Sausalito in a loft overlooking the San Francisco Bay. One morning I woke up and found twenty calls from my mother on my cell phone — I’d moved it into another room because I needed to sleep and Susan and I, go figure, wanted a little private time — and the twenty-first call was from the emergency room nurse at Mt. Sinai, who said that she’d somehow fallen through her plastic shower door and scratched up her face and how quickly could I get home. It happened to be New Year’s Eve, every flight was booked, and I couldn’t return to New York until the following day, which I did, then jumped into a taxi at the airport and went straight to her apartment, where I found her fully made up, an orange betadyne tear on her cheek, and waiting for me to take her out to lunch down the street at Cafe Luxembourg.

Two years earlier, I was on my first book tour and Susan, whose 92-year-old mother was at home with a live-in caregiver, got a call from her mother’s neighbor saying that she’d seen the caregiver being taken out of the house on a stretcher, suffering from stress-related Meniere’s Disease. A month or so later, on the next round of the book tour, Susan, who had accompanied me, called home to check in with her mother. I was sitting on the floor in my friend’s Berkeley living room with her pit bull, Odetta, in my lap, and doing a phone interview with a local NPR affiliate while simultaneously watching Susan outside on her cell phone, marching up and down Cornell Avenue in front of the house, furiously waving her hands: her mother had waited until we were gone, safely on the other side of the country, and then fired the caregiver.

Because this is what they do. I’ve heard it all from my friends with difficult older parents: they throw out their personal alert button and say Sorry, whoops, didn’t mean to. Or they cut up the mail with kitchen scissors so that the time-sensitive materials that Medicaid needs to be signed and returned no longer exist, and you don’t know that it existed at all because you never knew about it until your mother’s Medicaid manager calls you screaming, her hair on fire, threatening to cut off her services, and you have no idea what she’s talking about. There are scarier versions of this: the adult child caregiver who goes on a much-needed cruise for her sixtieth birthday and takes the parent’s car keys with her, only to get an emergency ship-to-shore call from the police who have found the adult child’s mother driving one way the wrong way on a highway because she had the presence of mind to bury the spare key in a container of ten-year-old Wondra flour sitting in the pantry when her daughter wasn’t looking.

Sometimes dementia is the issue, and the root cause of the acting-out; but many times — as with my mother — it’s not. I’ve seen her behave this way since I was in single digits; I wrote a book about it not too long ago.

The last time we were away, I checked in with my mother as I always do, twice a day — once in the morning to make sure she is awake and has taken her pills, and once in the evening to make sure she’s eaten. I asked her about dinner,

It was fine, she said. I ate a little something. And I took some salt.

What do you mean you “took some salt?”

I put some salt on a teaspoon, and I took it, like medicine.

For a minute, I was speechless. My mouth and my brain couldn’t catch up to each other.

You have high blood pressure, I eventually said. Grandma died of congestive heart failure. WHY would you take salt?

Because the doctor told me I’m dehydrated and salt makes you retain water. If I retain water, I won’t get dehydrated.

Also, she added out of a long silence, I seem to be allergic to my shoes. I can’t get my feet into them, so I had to throw them away. I need you to come home and get me some new shoes.

But I’m not coming home for another week, I said.

That’s fine, she said. I’ll just walk around barefoot. I’ll try and step over the broken glass.

In reality, we are much further along with my mother now, in terms of her general health and her ability to navigate the world with or without me. But one thing is for certain: the thing that has always made her tick — the cunning, the workarounds that I have long had to develop my own workarounds for — is still there, sharp as ever. Her enmity for me remains palpable, as is often the case for adult child caregivers with elderly borderline parents, with or without dementia. The filter is gone; the social propriety has vaporized.

In less than forty-eight hours, Susan and I will be wending our way east, to London, possibly my favorite city on earth. We will see friends; we will walk everywhere; we will eat very (very) well. And when we are standing in Vita Sackville-West’s White Garden at Sissinghurst, attempting to stave off tears at the utter beauty of the place at a time of such profound ugliness, I expect my phone will ring. It will be the agency that employs my mother’s caregiver, her Medicaid manager, or the neighbor.

Or it will be my mother herself, calling to say that she hopes we’re having a nice time.

*Flag of Doom

---

Grilled Lamb with Ghee-Roasted Potatoes and Greens with Radish and Spring Onion

Possibly a little odd to include a recipe after this essay. But, as I always do when things get difficult, I’m finding solace in the garden and the kitchen, where everything I’m cooking has taken a turn for the simpler. It’s that time of year: the grill is on, we use smaller plates, and the ratio of meat to veg tips towards the latter.

Lamb can be very strong, but we are lucky enough to have Sepe Farm (almost) in our backyard. It’s just the two of us and we’re trying not to cook in a way that will leave us with too many leftovers to get buried in the back of the fridge, hence its diminutive size. Lamb takes to Middle Eastern spices brilliantly, and I like to either marinate it or dry-rub it with a spice blend called Al-Andalus, sent to me by my dear friend/brother-from-another-mother

Simón de Swaan

, a phenomenal (professionally-trained) home cook and storyteller who writes from the intersection of family, food, history, and culinary culture, and who has just joined us here on Substack.

If you can’t find Al-Andalus, toast cumin seeds in a dry skillet, grind them, and blend them with a little olive oil and lemon juice to create a paste and proceed with the recipe.

Grilled Lamb

1-2 tablespoons of Al-Andalus spice blend or similar, or toasted and ground cumin seeds

Pinch of ground cayenne

1/2 tablespoon fine sea salt

1 2-3 pound boneless leg of lamb, untied

4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, divided

zest of one lemon

Juice of two lemons, divided

In a small bowl combine the spice blend with the cayenne and salt. Open up the leg of lamb and lay it flat on your cutting board, fat-side up, Using a sharp knife, carefully score the fat just deeply enough for the spice rub to reach the meat. Massage it with half of the spice blend, turn it over, and repeat, making sure to get the spice into every crevice. Place in a sturdy zip lock bag or in a glass container with a lid, drizzle with two tablespoons of olive oil, massaging it into the meat. Add the zest and juice of one lemon. Seal the bag or the container and refrigerate overnight.

The next day, remove the meat from the bag, set it on a platter, and let it come to room temperature for about an hour. Preheat your grill to medium-high, about 425 degrees F (I turn on only two of my burners and leave the other side of the grill off). While it is coming to temperature, combine the remaining olive oil and lemon juice in a small bowl (feel free to add a pinch of additional spice blend).

Place the lamb fat-side up on the grill over indirect heat to roast for about ten minutes. At the ten-minute mark, baste the lamb with the olive oil and lemon juice, and continue to roast for another five to eight minutes. Turn the lamb over and continue to baste for another ten to twelve minutes. Turn it over again, baste it again, and repeat for another five minutes. Using an instant-read thermometer, take its temperature: for medium-rare, it should read 130-135 degrees F. (I prefer mine just pink rather than rare.)

Place the lamb on a platter and loosely drape with foil. Let it rest for ten minutes, squeeze a juicy lemon over it, and carve. Serve warm.

Serves 2-3

Ghee-Roasted Potatoes

12 small new potatoes, as fresh as possible, par-boiled (bring them to a boil in salted water until they’re barely soft to a knife point, and remove them from the water immediately)

1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil

Pinch of flakey sea salt, plus more to taste

1 tablespoon of best-quality ghee

Optional: sprigs of fresh rosemary or thyme

Tear off a piece of foil the size of a newspaper page. Place the potatoes directly onto the middle of the foil, drizzle with olive oil and sea salt, and dollop with the ghee, add the herbs if using, squeeze the corners of the foil together creating a small package. Slash a few times with a sharp knife. Fifteen minutes before you remove the lamb from the grill, place the potatoes on the hot side of the grill while the lamb is roasting on the other side,

Turn from time to time to keep the potatoes from burning. Take a peek into the package: if things are browning too quickly, move it to the side of the grill with the lamb.

Roast until tender, about fifteen minutes (depending on the size of your potatoes). Keep them sealed in the foil until you slice the lamb. Serve warm with another pinch of salt.

Serves 3

Greens with Radish and Spring Onion

A non-recipe recipe: exactly what it sounds like. Toss tender greens with sliced radish and thinly sliced spring onion, and dress with a mild combination of sherry wine vinegar and olive oil.